Comprehension is the main goal of reading. We must teach students strategies to
comprehend what they are reading. There are many strategies to make
comprehension easier and summarization is one of the main strategies.
Summarizing is a skill that must be taught to students through teacher modeling.
This lesson will teach students how to summarize an article by learning the
three necessary steps of the summarization process which are
deleting information that is not important or is repeated, highlighting the
important and necessary details by using key words or headings, and finding a
topic sentence that covers the main idea and if there is not a topic sentence
make one.

2.
Highlight the important and necessary details by using key words or headings.

3.
Find a topic sentence that covers the main idea and if there is not a topic
sentence make one.

* Summarization checklist

Did the Student…

Yes

No

Get rid of unimportant information?

Get rid of repeated information?

Organize items under one umbrella term?

Select a topic?

Write a topic statement that covers everything
that is important from the passage of the text?

Procedure:

1. I will begin by introducing the comprehension strategy of summarizing to the
students. “Today we are going to talk about summarizing. This is a great way to
help us understand and remember what we read. Does anyone already know what
summarizing is? (allow students to guess) Summarizing is taking out all of the
unimportant facts and recording the main facts and ideas.

2. Next, we would discuss the rules to summarization. “Now we are going to look
at the three rules for summarizing.” Show the poster to the students and read
the rules out loud. “Now I want you to read this paragraph about bottle nose
dolphins. Before you read it we are going to discuss some vocab words from the
article. Imitated, moans, and groans.” Give definition of each word and discuss
meaning. “Once you are done we are going
to summarize the paragraph together.”

3. Display the Bottle nose dolphin article on overhead and pass out article to
each student. Give a talk to get the students interested in the bottle nose
dolphin, “ Has anyone ever been to the beach and see a dolphin? What about has
anyone seen a dolphin show at the zoo? Dolphins are interesting animals and this
article will tell us many facts that we never knew about them. ”Let’s look at
our paragraph…Follow along as I read out loud: ‘Their moans, groans, squeaks,
whistles, and grunts can sound as if they're a heavy metal band. But bottlenose
dolphins make their own kind of music. Many of the sounds they make could be
imitated by holding a balloon tightly by the neck, then letting the air out
faster and slower.’

“Now let's look at the steps on our summarizing poster. First, I need to pick
out the most important information. This is tricky! How can we tell what
information is important and what it not? (give time for response). One strategy
I use is seeing what words are repeated. Look in our article the word dolphin is
repeated. I also noticed a lot of synonyms are used. Moans, Groans, squeaks,
etc. are all different words for sounds. So we know that dolphins and sounds are
important in this article. Underline
important information: “Bottlenose dolphins make their own kind of music”. “Now
that I have underlined the important information and ignored the unimportant
parts, I need to create a sentence about the summary. Let's try this: Dolphins
communicate with their own kind of sounds that is like music.” Do you see how I
summarized the paragraph? Does anyone else have any other summaries they think
could be better? Does anyone have any questions about how I summarized this
paragraph?” Answer all of the students questions.

4. “See, instead of writing two long sentences, I wrote one sentence that told
me the same important information. Let's try the next paragraph together. Read
the next paragraph silently to yourselves, mark out the unimportant information
and highlight the important information. Once you have finished, we will work
together to create a summary. Give students time to read and highlight.”

5. Ask the students, “ What was some of the important passages you highlighted?”
Review their answers and circle good answers on the transparency. “Now that we
have the important facts, let's make a summary sentence. Who has a good start to
the summary?” Work with students to create a summary.

6. Now, on your own, I want you to read the last two paragraphs in the article
and create a one- two sentence summary. Remember to highlight your important
passages, cross out the unimportant passages and write your summary on a sheet
of paper. Turn in your summary stapled to your highlighted paper.

Assessment:
I will assess the students by looking at their summaries using my summary
checklist.